...Now let’s look at time from a very different angle. Our consciousness of time as an ‘objective’ reality is geared, through personal experience and racial memory, to the rhythmic cycles in nature, from the movements of sun and moon across the sky to the rise and fall of tides in the sea, the regular alteration of seasons and the phenomena of incessant birth, growth and death. It is these more or less fixed periodicities that have encouraged us to depend upon time as something comprehensible and orderly, and to divide it up into ever smaller, ever more precise fragments, and to devise machines to keep track of the passage of time and gear all our activities to the working of those machines; from trains to daily doses of medicine to the computer I am writing on, nearly everything in common experience runs by the clock now. But let us next acknowledge to ourselves that for the same person, time sometimes flies and sometimes drags and sometimes seems to stand still (meaning that the person has become temporarily oblivious of the passage of time – as with those who are in love, or concentrating on solving a difficult problem that interests them strongly, or, what I believe is another name for the same thing, deep in meditation). Combine this with our awareness that at least in one place - to wit the human memory - the arrow of time can fly backwards, and with recent scientific insights into the elastic nature of time – to wit, that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, and would stop entirely when that ceiling is reached (from which it is probably valid to derive the hypothesis that it might go backwards if the speed of light could somehow be exceeded – things would start happening in reverse, we would first digest the food and then eat it, and keep growing younger…!).Consider also Einstein’s demonstration that in a certain sense time and space are just two different ways of conceiving the same reality, and the modern cosmologist’s notion that very close to the Big Bang and the Big Crunch, we would reach ‘singularities’, meaning that time and space would stop making any sense at all, and we might begin to realize that time is a far more protean and nebulous thing than many of us, who have been taught a little science and endowed with a little reason and who are immersed entirely in the world of here and now (the ‘world’ defined by the club and market and workplace and neighbourhood) care to think. One name for God in the Hindu tradition is Mahakaal, represented by a chariot wheel turning eternally. Maybe it is true that when we are dealing with Time we have come too close to probing the nature of ‘ultimate reality’ (Stephen Hawking named his quest A Brief History of Time, and talked about knowing the mind of God, despite being ‘convinced’ that he is an atheist – ha, ha!), and there reason fails us. The great mystics have always claimed that the veil of maya cannot be pierced by reason alone: it calls for imagination (as so many writers of genius have shown), for empathy (being ‘at one’ with the cosmos, which is the supreme goal for all mystics) and maybe something more. Recall that a great 20th-century scientist has exclaimed that the deeper we probe into Nature, she seems to become not only queerer than we think, but queerer than we can think! Perhaps scientific man, if he does not want to remain stuck in a cul-de-sac, needs to become a little more humble, a little more open to the very many ways that Nature talks to us? Maybe laboratory-work and mathematics are not the keys to the whole truth, as Descartes and Galileo thought? Perhaps, someday, serious scientists will have to ponder over the classics and practise meditation and try to write poetry as part of the course-work, and no monk will imagine that he can reach for God and Man without drinking deeply of science? This, incidentally, was Vivekananda’s dream!...